


got a war in my mind

by SugarFey



Series: Life Is Hard To Find Again [2]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 22:10:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12993555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarFey/pseuds/SugarFey
Summary: He’s asking for her help, she realises, has been planning to ask, maybe, since he found her on the walkway.He finds her in the cargo bay with a drink in her hand and too much on her mind. He always sees her differently from how she sees herself.





	got a war in my mind

**Author's Note:**

> So here it is, my first longer Thor/Valkyrie fic. Thanks to SneakyHufflepuff for the beta!
> 
> Warnings: PTSD, alcoholism

The alcohol is swilling sickly in her belly already, but it’s nothing she isn’t used to, so Brunnhilde takes another sip from the nearly empty bottle hanging from her hand.

It would appear ungracious, sinking into an isolated alcoholic depression not long after being hailed a Saviour of Asgard, but saving people doesn’t mean you actually want to be around them, and the walkway overlooking the cargo bay is one of the few places offering any privacy aboard the luxury transport hauler turned refugee vessel.

She lets her legs dangle over the open, empty space, staring at the floor far beneath her feet. A few stacked containers, some heaped bundles carried on the backs of survivors. Whatever is left over from the ship’s Grandmaster days is probably inappropriate for all but the most adult consumption, and for some reason, Brunnhilde finds this fact tragically funny.

She raises the bottle to her lips again when a firm tread on the metal grating pulls her attention back from the open space below her feet. 

Thor, son of Odin, former contender and new king of a realm that no longer exists, is standing awkwardly on the walkway, balancing what looks, ridiculously, like one of the Grandmaster’s ornate covered tea trays. 

“Your majesty,” she greets sarcastically, lifting her bottle in salute. “Come to order me back to civilisation?” 

Thor’s face breaks into one of his boyish grins, but it’s less broad than it used to be. “I don’t imagine I could order you to do anything you didn’t choose to do.” 

Brunnhilde does not acknowledge this, and Thor’s smile becomes a little more uncertain. “Actually, I came to see if you’d like something to eat. Korg told me you were here.” He holds out the tray in his hands to add a visual demonstration. “It’s not much,” he says, with a slight note of apology. “We have to ration our supplies until we reach the next planet.” 

Decades of Sakaarian slum-honed instincts tell her to sneer and go back to her drinking without another glance, but Brunnhilde can recognise a gesture when she sees one. “Whatever it is,” she concedes, “it’s got to be better than the slop on Sakaar.”

Thor takes a breath and bends to gingerly place the tray on the walkway beside her. “I can’t promise that, I’m afraid.” 

“We’ll see.” 

What she does not tell him is that sometimes, she ate quite well on Sakaar. The Grandmaster took a fancy to her over the years, and extended invitations to his parties. She didn’t attend very often, but the food at the parties was good and the drinks even better, and she never went home alone. In her more sober moments, she’s shamed by the creeping reality that sometimes her actions on Sakaar came to her very, very easily. 

Thor straightens, shifting from foot to foot with his empty hands clasped awkwardly in front of him, and Brunnhilde rolls her eyes.

“Either join me or leave me alone, Lord of Thunder.”

“It’s God of Thunder,” he mutters, but he crouches down and slides his legs over the edge in an unexpectedly fluid motion. 

She lets her eyes sweep over him for a moment, because she’s drunk and he is rather well formed even if he is yet another royal. Thor catches her eye and Brunnhilde quickly passes him one of her full bottles before the silence stretches on too long. 

Brunnhilde turns her attention to the tea tray, lifting the cover to reveal a small round of cheese, a hardboiled egg and a hunk of crusty bread, with a small knife on the side for cutting. She tears off a piece of the bread and combines it with a slice of cheese, raising it to her mouth and—

_Oh._

The smell of heavy, fresh Asgardian bread. Still warm and nutty despite the ship’s recycled air. How long has it been since she last ate bread from the bakery near the barracks? How long has it been since her comrades last shared a meal, making crude jokes over roast meat and ale? She never thought much about the bread they used to eat. Was it on the table on the final night? How long has it been… 

A throat clears in the distance, and she comes back to herself. Walkway, spaceship, space. Right. 

“We could move some of the supplies to the side,” Thor says gently, but his voice still makes her twitch in not quite surprise. “Set up an area for training here.”

She gives a non-committal “hmph” with a shrug for added nonchalance.

“I would be honoured if you would spar with me sometime,” he continues. “I saw you fight. You were… magnificent.”

Brunnhilde snorts, taking a swig from her bottle again. “I was lucky. I was so rusty Hela should’ve killed me with her first blow.” 

Thor pops the cork from his bottle and lets it hang loosely in his hand. “Even so. I’m sure there is much I could learn from you.” 

“I doubt it, storm boy.”

Thor takes a long drink from his own bottle and silence stretches out between them again, broken only by the persistent hum of the ship’s engine.

Brunnhilde considers sending him off with a snide remark, but the silence isn’t actually awkward. There’s a quiet sense of calm as they each nurse their drinks. Years ago she might have called it companionship.

She looks down at her hands, still hardened from a lifetime of battle. How long has it been? How long…

“Heimdall said you were an officer in the Valkyrior.” Thor’s voice pulls her into the moment again. 

_Heimdall needs to mind his own business,_ Brunnhilde thinks, gritting her teeth. “Only a captain.” 

“Still, you had to earn your rank. You had to prove yourself in battle and show that you could lead.” 

He’s asking for her help, she realises, has been planning to ask, maybe, since he found her on the walkway. “Oh, Lord of Thunder, no.”

She laughs at his predictable flash of annoyance at the name, but then he recovers.

“Why not?” He leans forward eagerly, an echo of his admiration on Sakaar. “The Valkyrior are legend. The people will accept your guidance. _I_ will accept it.”

He’s smiling again, his face lit up with the strength of summer, but the skin creases around his eye patch, a clash between prince and king.

“Thor…” His first name slips out of her mouth before she can help it. “I could barely bring myself to return to Asgard.”

“And yet you did,” he replies, his voice a low rumble. “Please, join Heimdall and serve as my advisor. Our people are desperate for hope. You can give them that, as a proven survivor.”

Is this truly how he sees her? A proven survivor, someone who abandoned every vow she made? She stares down at her boots to avoid looking at him.

“My lover died saving me. That’s how I survived.”

Brunnhilde sees him bow his head out of the corner of her eye, the bottle abandoned beside him. His hands lie limply in his lap, and for the first time she notices how rough and calloused they are. It shouldn’t be as surprising as it is, but then, she stopped studying people too closely on Sakaar. It didn’t pay to notice details that might make you see someone as a person.

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

A laugh forces its way out of her dry throat. “Funny. That’s exactly what your shithead brother said before he ripped the memory from my skull and made me relive it.”

She hears Thor’s sharp intake of breath and on impulse, she lets go of the bottle in her hand, watching as it hurtles downwards and smashes with a satisfying crash on the floor of the cargo bay.

For a moment it is as though they’re both transfixed by the pattern of broken glass far below them. The ceiling lights reflect in the shards, causing a faint, far off glitter out of place for the cold grey of the cargo bay.

It’s Thor who breaks the silence, again. “It was wrong of him to invade your mind.”

“Yes,” she says simply. “It was.”

“Hela killed three of my closest friends,” he returns. “Heimdall told me. You know, it took me hours before I decided to look for them on the ship? We were companions since our youth, and it did not occur to me to wonder if they had survived.” 

He sighed heavily, looking down at his hands. “It sounds ridiculous, but I thought they would live forever.”

“Yeah, well, I used to think that too. So, drinks.”

She sees the way the Asgardians look at her as she passes – their awe so different, but almost the same as the citizens of Sakaar. She hates it. 

“I don’t think I can do this on my own,” Thor confesses, breaking her thoughts. He always fills her silences.

“And you come to me for help? Are you sure Hela didn’t take your other eye too?”

The words are cold, cruel and far too bitter, and she expects him to growl or storm off, leaving her alone with echoes and the taste of regret on her tongue. It would not be undeserved.

A vein jumps in Thor’s jaw, his shoulders taut as his chest rises and falls. He brings his hand up, and Brunnhilde tenses, ready to block his retaliation. She’ll kick him off the walkway if she has to.

Instead, his large fingers uncurl, and he reaches up, halting along his cheek, until he brushes the edge of his eye patch.

“You know,” he breathes, “every morning it’s as though I forget. I wake up and wonder why I can’t see like I once did. Then I remember what happened, and then I remember everything else.” 

The tension in her body evaporates, because she remembers every morning, remembers the jolt and sudden weightlessness of free fall, remembers Sigrid’s dying scream as bodies rained from the boiling sky, the images crashing in on her until she drowns them with drink. It’s been so long, gods, it’s been too long. 

She’s reaching up to his face before she is fully aware of it, and her fingers almost touch the edge of his eye patch before she pulls back.

Thor catches her hand, holding it loosely in his. His fingers brush along her palm.

“Don’t, please. It’s good to have someone who doesn’t step gently around me.”

She swallows the rising confusion in her throat at the feel of their clasped hands. “Great, because I don’t think I’m capable of that.”

Thor shrugs, loosening his hold on her hand. “You’re not so bad,” he says, a little of the playfulness creeping back into his voice. “My brother tried to take over a planet once.” 

She places her hand back down onto the cold, rough grating, willing herself to relax. “That sounds like a story.”

Thor smiles, a little ruefully, and Brunnhilde feels a soft glow of heat spread through her belly that is only partly to do with liquor. The eye patch gives him a roguish look, and his shorn hair makes him look less like the spoiled golden princeling she found in the junkyard. He is still good-natured, for the most part, which is more adorable than she will admit, but his scars are a little closer to the surface now.

Frankly, the man is built like a tree and she would not mind climbing him.

Well, Brunnhilde was never known for controlling her impulses. She touches his knee gently, testing his reaction. His breath hitches but he does not push her away.

It’s all the encouragement she needs to press her lips against his.

At first, he stiffens, a note of surprise rising in his throat that she catches with her mouth, and then he is kissing her back in kind. His lips give a faint tingle, perhaps from the storm trapped beneath his skin. It’s a heady combination, and Brunnhilde sinks into the kiss, letting it wash through her.

When they finally break apart, Thor looks slightly stunned. “My lady, I… Brunn…”

The nickname, unheard for hundreds of years, jolts through her as though he really has used one of his lightning bolts, and she grips the back of his neck a little harder than is necessary. Learning her name does not give him the right to use it so freely, not yet, not like this.

“Shut up.” She fights to keep her voice calm even as the words threaten to choke her. “Don’t make this into something it’s not.”

Something like hurt flashes in Thor’s eye, but it’s gone in an instant, replaced by dark heat. “And what is this, then?”

Brunnhilde sighs, releasing his neck. She lets her fingers linger over the skin of his throat and feels him swallow. “Look, you’re attractive, you’re strong, I’m slightly drunk and very horny. I think we’d have good sex. If I read that wrongly, I apologise…”

“No!” Thor quickly leans forward and grabs her hand again, covering it with his. “I mean, yes, I would. Like to, I mean. With you.”

His other hand comes to rest on her waist as he closes the space between them, and her breath catches when he lifts her arm and presses a kiss to her wrist.

“Right,” she manages shakily. “Glad we’ve got that sorted.”

She pulls up her legs and pushes herself to standing, impressed that she only sways a little. Asgardian constitution strikes again. She holds her arm out to Thor, beckoning.

Lust written across his face now, Thor takes her offered arm and pulls himself up. With one warning wink, Brunnhilde uses the leverage to spin him until he slams into the wall.

“What the…”

Thor doesn’t have time to finish before she crashes her lips against his, one arm gripping his muscled shoulder and the other reaching up to his neck to tug him down towards her. He’s so much taller than her that he has to bend from the waist to kiss her properly, and after a pause he does, strong arms wrapping tightly across her back, fingers lost in her hair.

Her assessment of their compatibility was definitely correct.

Brunnhilde is feathering kisses down the curve of his throat when she feels him give a sharp gasp and his hips shift out to the side. She her head snaps up to look at him, has she pushed him too far?

“Thor—“

He shakes his head slightly, and Brunnhilde is about to back off when he bends down and his lips meet hers again, softly, sweetly almost, but his hips are still angled away from her. All of a sudden it hits her that he’s trying to be gallant, and she nudges him in the ribs when their lips break apart. 

“Trying to be a gentleman?”

A faint blush blooms on Thor’s cheeks, just visible beneath the beard. “What can I say? I was raised to be polite.”

 _How delightful._ Slowly, so that he can still object if he wants to, Brunnhilde reaches down and cups him gently through his leather pants.

“Oh.” Thor’s head falls forward as he jerks into her palm.

Chuckling darkly, Brunnhilde leans in and nips his earlobe, just hard enough to hurt. “How’s that for politeness?”

He makes a noise low in his throat, grabbing her wrists and flipping her around until her back is against the wall where he once stood. “Better?” he growls, pinning her wrists, and she laughs freely with the surprise of it. 

She feels giddy and younger than she has in decades, and it is glorious. 

Groaning into his mouth, she hooks her legs around his hips so that she is flush up against him, and Thor makes a low sound of approval. His hands slide under her thighs to support her and she tries to use the wall as leverage to grind against him. 

Despite her best efforts, their leather armour doesn’t allow for much friction, and Brunnhilde swears under her breath as she bucks her hips. Thor’s fingers clasp her legs and she bites a bruise onto his neck to vent her frustration.

Thor nuzzles her earlobe. “We can continue this in my quarters, if you like.” 

_Yes, yes!_ Brunnhilde cups his cheek, about to assent, when—

“Uh, Thor? We have a situation regarding the distribution of, uh, lavatory paper? Oh… if you’re doing mating rituals, I can come back later, but there’s a line for the second deck toilet and people are getting antsy…”

Korg _._

Fuck that walking pile of pebbles. Brunnhilde cranes her head and spots the gladiator-turned-revolutionary standing in the doorway to her right. He waves apologetically and she throws him her best death glare while Thor lets off a half-dozen highly un-kingly curses against her shoulder.

Brunnhilde rubs her thumb against the short hairs at the base of his head, already damp with sweat. “Duty calls, your majesty.”

Thor pouts, actually _pouts,_ and that alone is enough to make her smash her lips to his again, short and sharp with promise.

He leans in and she places a hand on his chest, gently pushing him away.

“Keep up, Lord of Thunder. You’re doing all right by yourself.”

She turns to walk away when she hears him whisper under his breath. “But I’d be better with you.”

Brunnhilde shakes her head, the joy of the moment fading fast. “Not yet.”

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [it comes and goes in waves](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13451766) by [SugarFey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarFey/pseuds/SugarFey)




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